About this blog

Better Together provides a space to share experiences with – and strategies for engaging – three critical global issues that PC(USA) global partners are challenging us to address together as the body of Christ. These three issues are 1) addressing root causes of poverty, especially as it impacts women and children; 2) sharing the Good News of God’s love in Jesus Christ; and 3) working for reconciliation in cultures of violence, including our own. The purpose of Better Together is to feed a conversation to shape concrete action strategies at the October 2012 “Dallas II: Better Together” consultation and beyond.

Both Dessa and Cobbie Palm, mission co-workers to the Philippines, were born there as well. In her keynote at Dallas II Friday, she spoke about how the Filipino word “kapwa” literally means “fellow human being,” but actually bears a more profound moral kinship. Kapwa informs the way Christians should treat one another.

Dessa spoke about how, in the 1930s, an accord was signed by the U.S. and the Philippines on sugar trading, engraving the Filipino economy in a triple dependency: on monocrop culture, on sugar trading and industry, and on the U.S. as a single market. Fifty years ...